Anyway, I’ve seen that movie several times, and still really love it.  But one quote stood out to me, one which I never remember hearing in the movie before.  I think it might be one of my favorite movie quotes ever, and I thought I’d pass it along.  Happy Thanksgiving!

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
-Willy Wonka

Are you handy with Photoshop?

Do you have both sets of our actions, and use them all the time?

Does your friendly personality come across well in emails?

Do you have a few extra hours a week that you’d like to make some money with?

If you can answer “yes” to all those questions, I want to hear from you!  I’m currently looking to expand our team with a Customer Support Ambassador.  You would be responsible for responding to our support requests and general questions in a timely manner.  If people are having trouble figuring something out, you’d give them a hand.  If they lost their actions, you’d lookup their order and re-send the download link.  If someone wanted to know why they should get our actions, you’d give them the million reasons to do so ;)

You can work from anywhere you’d like – just as long as you have an internet connection, good customer service skills, and are crazy about our actions.  You will also need to be avaible 7 days a week, and respond to questions within 24 hours.

If you’re interested, shoot an email over to doug at gettotallyrad.com, and we can discuss things further.

Before:

and After:

Just makes a huge difference, IMO, having that extra bit of snap and detail in the final image.

In case you were wondering how we got to this image BEFORE the before image – some new goodies, mixed with a tiny bit of POS lens (from TRA2) with the highlight flare unchecked and the edge blurring turned down (and masked off the guy’s face).

The SOOC image looked like this:

Just workin’ away on new ways to make things even radder.

In other news – can the frickin Cubs PLEASE stop losing now?  Every time they add another game to their losing streak, a little piece of me dies.  Thankfully, the Brewers have decided to suck at precisely the same time, so the standings haven’t changed… but still…

Q: Will TRA2 be an update to the Totally Rad Action Mix, or a separate product?

A: TRA2 is a completely separate set of actions, and will be sold as such. Any updates / bugfixes will be made available for free to customers who already own the product, but TRA2 is a completely different product, with its own pricetag. Think of it more as a sequel than an updated version.

Q: How many actions will be in the new set?

A: Currently we have about 50 new actions in the set, but the final number will probably change a bit. I have at least three more additions that I want to write, and we might yank one or two from the final version. If it’s lame, it doesn’t make it into the set, and I’ve killed at least a dozen actions that I wrote for the next set, only to decide later that they’re just not good enough.

Q: How much will TRA2 cost?

A: The price will likely be $149.00 or similar. We’ll probably also make a combined package with both sets of action available, as a discount vs the combined retail total of both sets.

Q: Are you developing something for Lightroom?  Now that I have LR, I hate using Photoshop, and want cool presets.

A: We are, but don’t expect miracles.  Lightroom is an impressive program, but most of the things that you love about TRA, and will love about TRA2, just simply can’t be translated into a preset for Lightroom.  The capability for tweaking photos afforded by LR is actually a lot more limited than people would think, but we’re going to be looking into exactly how far we can push the program very soon, so maybe we’ll discover some things we didn’t know… stay tuned.  But don’t expect LR presets to be able to replace or replicate the functionality available in Photoshop.  It ain’t gonna happen.  Adobe isn’t going to take a 60% pay cut by replacing Photoshop with something that costs half as much.  Beyond basic color and exposure corrections, Photoshop is still king.

Q: I read some earlier blog posts about scripts and plugins – what exactly IS TRA2?

A: TRA2 will be another set of straight Photoshop actions. What follows is a slightly geeky rant, so beware… When I sat down to start working on another set of Photoshop tools, I looked at all the different ways that Photoshop is programmable and extendable, and every option was on the table. Photoshop’s scripting system allows you to automate the program in three ways – with actions, scripts, or automation plugins. Actions are great because they offer single-click operation via button mode on the layers palette, and because people who want to learn more about Photoshop can pick them apart to learn what’s going on. So they simultaneously offer a way to accomplish complicated tasks, as well as a learning tool. One big downside is that they don’t offer any ability to modify their own behavior based on the context of the image, which means that they operate in a very “dumb” way. For instance, there’s no way to change the radius of a gaussian blur step based on the pixel dimensions of an image. This means that many actions will behave very differently on web sized images than they do on full-res images. The other downside is that they are stateless (geek terminology for the fact that they can’t remember information between executions). And finally, they don’t offer any kind of user interface, aside from the ability to pop a simple, alert-style dialog via the “stop” command.

Photoshop scripts circumvent all those major issues, but unfortunately, Adobe decided that scripts would be called via the scripts menu, which, unfortunately, is very cumbersome. It’s too many mouse clicks to get to things, when you’d be calling 4 or 5 scripts per image, and the scripts menu itself doesn’t offer you any way to organize things. So if you had 50 scripts, it’d be a pain to use. We looked at having scripts run most of the logic, and just calling the scripts through actions, but, again, Adobe unfortunately chose a very cumbersome way of referencing scripts from an action. Actions in Photoshop reference scripts through OS-specific, hard-coded paths. So basically, installation would be a nightmare for most people. Since the .atn file format is proprietary, and unpublished, and basically a nightmare to try to parse, generating custom, installation-specific atn files is out, too. So scripts were a non-starter, ultimately, because I just didn’t like the user-experience compromises that they entailed…

Which brings us to automation plugins.  Those don’t have the drawbacks of scripts, from an integration perspective, but they also are compiled machine code – which means different versions for mac and windows plus decreased compatibility overall.  Since plugins are actually compiled, and not interpreted code, they have the potential to crash Photoshop, and otherwise cause more system instability than interpreted programs that run inside Photoshop.  Plus, they’re much more of a headache to develop, and relying heavily on automation plugins would have doubled development time, or more, meaning less actions for you guys, or a higher price tag, or both.

So the long and short of it is that just writing things as actions gets us most of what I wanted for this next product, and the other options, after much exploration, all had fatal flaws, based on my priorities for what the end user experience would be like.

How did we pick a random winner?  Simple.  Everybody who downloaded our Totally Rad Action Mix sample was entered into a spreadsheet, which automatically assigns a row number to their name.  Then we went to random.org, had a random number generated, and picked the person from that row (and since the order in which people signed up was already random, this just made it double-random).

Thanks again everybody for the great response to the new site!

-Doug

PS – if I’m taking a little longer than usual to get back to emails, please forgive me… my volume of email has increased just about tenfold since the launch of the new site, and it was all I could do last week to keep up at all… took a couple days off from dealing with anything except emergencies this weekend (I mean, I had to find time to take my mom to the Pirates Dinner Adventure yesterday, right?)  Should be back on top of things in a day or so, though.  Thanks for your patience!

PPS – Pirates Dinner Adventure sucked.  Don’t go.  There isn’t enough beer in the world to make it tolerable.

If I’ve been slacking on the blogging lately, it’s because I’ve been doing a lot of menial things to get ready for this week, and haven’t really had anything interesting to share… Things like designing a new backdrop for our booth (ooh!!) and updating 500 slides worth of material for the workshop (aaahhh!), and modifying our cart to accept PayPal (wow!)…  Lots of cool goodies on the way once I get back, though.

Hey – I like getting these because I think they’re funny, but my wife doesn’t get any spam… could you send her a few scam letters, too? She’s feeling left out. Send em to chenin@boutwellstudio.com as well. Thanks! I really love these emails… quality stuff!

Dr. Johnson Michael wrote:

From Dr. Johnson Michael
Tel:+447031914271
fax:+447014216900
I am Dr.Johnson Michael From Harlsden, North West London , here in England. I work for Natwest Bank Corporation London. I am writing you from my office that will be of an imense benefit to both of us. In my department,being the assistant manager (Greater London Regional Office), I discovered an abandoned sum of $12.5 million USA Dollars (Twelve million five hundred thousand Usa Dollars) in an account that belongs to one of our foreign customers Late Mr.Thompson Morrison American citizen who unfortunately lost his life in the plane crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 which crashed on January 31 2000, including his wife and only daughter. The choice of contacting you is aroused from the geograpgical nature of where you live,
particularly due to the sensivity of the transaction.and the confidentiality herein. Now our bank has been waiting for any of the relatives to come-up for the claim but nobody has done that. I personally has been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for 2 years now, I seek your consent to present you as the next of kin /Will Beneficiary to the deceased so that the proceeds of this account valued at 12.5 Million Dollars can be paid to you. This will be disbursed or shared in these percentages,60% to me and 40% to you. I have secured all necessary legal documents that can be used to back up this claim we are making. All i need is to fill in your names to the documents and legalise it in the court here to prove you as the legitimate beneficiary. All I require now is your honest Co-operation, Confidentiality and Trust to enable us see this transaction through. I guarantee you that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law. Please,provide me the following: as we have 5 days to run it through. this is very very URGENT PLEASE. 1. Full Name 2. Your Telephone Number 3. Your Contact Address. Having gone through a methodical search, I decided to contact you hoping that you will find this proposal interesting. Please on your confirmation of this message and indicating your interest will furnish you with more information. Endeavor to let me know your decision rather than keep me waiting.

Regards,
Dr.Johnson Michael
Tel:+447031914271
fax:+447014216900
Email: dr.mjohnson1@hotmail.com